GLOBALIZATION AS THE NEGATION OF THE OTHER

«GLOBALIZATION AS THE NEGATION OF THE OTHER»

by Mile Babić

Source:Forum Bosnae (Forum Bosnae), issue: 39 / 2007, pages: 7­17, on www.ceeol.com.

GLoBALIZAtIon As tHe neGAtIon oF tHe otHeR

Mile Babić

My primary intention in this paper is to summarize the cur-rent debate on globalization, and then to offer a brief overview of the history of globalization and to demonstrate that globalization has so far been based on the negation of the other: a dual nega-tion, of the other without and the other within us .

The current debate on globalization

The proponents of globalization claim that its goal is the unity of the human race, of humankind as a whole . They want the whole of humanity to become one great family . They assert that globalization, based as it is on modern science and technology, brings about better communication between all regions of the world and its people. They seek to convince us that globalization is the way to achieve economic progress for the whole of human-ity, not only for the rich and powerful, and that globalization has no ambitions to do away with cultural and religious diversity, dif-ferent cultural and religious identities .

The critics of globalization point to the ways in which glo-balization leads to divisions, not unity, in everyday life . Instead of integrating everyone into a community of equals, it is exclud-ing more and more people from that community. The number of wealthy drops, while the number of poor rises. Globalism is, in fact, economism, setting its standards in terms of economic values and guided by a so-called neo-liberal ideology, for it is based on the oppression of the poor and the despoiling of nature. Although the opportunities for communication between people the world over are constantly increasing, solidarity with the poor is not . Globalization is concerned with the global economy, and seeks to subordinate existing cultural and religious differences to its own ends . In short, globalization is leading towards a uniform

�world. The laws of the market are more important to globalization than are human rights .1

In his Politika identita: kultura kao ideologija, Žarko Paić clas-sifies contemporary theories of globalization into eight groups:

Hyperglobalism, or the theory of epochal figuration (Albrow, Robertson, Smith);The techno-cultural determinism of history (Castells);The theory of reflexive modernization (Beck, Giddens, Bau-man);Anthropological theories of hybridity/creolization (Appa-durai, Bhabha, Leggewie, Hannerz);The cosmopolitan transfer of culture (Bhabha, Hall, Shimada);The theory of the clash of civilizations (Huntington);Deconstructionism and cultural studies (Hall, Grossberg, Mulhern, Flow);Post-Marxist critique of culture and ideology (Bourdieu, Ba-diou, Laclau, Hardt and Negri, Žižek).2For Paić, globalization is the universal ideology of the new

world order, the realization of the culture of postmodernism, both as a culture of lifestyles at the individual level and as a hybrid transnational culture of shifting identities at the global level . The essence of this new, post-modern culture in the age of globali-zation is that it justifies ideologically the development of global capitalism as the best possible global structure. Paić demonstrates that we are not living in a post-ideological age; ideologies have not faded away, but are emerging in a new form, in the form of culture. A cultural turn is coming about in postmodernism, as a result of which everything is now culturally defined; culture has become the ideology par excellence.3

Globalization, Paić avers, is the continuation of the modern-ism project in a post-modern context; in other words, modernism is manifested in the age of globalization in a different manner and by different means . In modernism, we have a stable identity, or identities, whether individual or collective, but in postmodernism

1 Concilium, Internationale Zeitschrift für Theologie, Grünewald, 37 . Jahr-gang, Dezember, Heft 5 . The entire issue is dedicated to globalization, un-der the heading Globalization and its Victims .

� Žarko Paić, Politika identita: kultura kao ideologija (The Politics of Iden-tity: Culture as Ideology), Zagreb: Antibarbarus, 2005, 7

3 ibid ., 5-13

Mile Babić

�we have unstable, hybrid identities . Nowadays both individuals and collectivities are struggling grimly to protect and affirm their identity. Culture has become the means of protecting one’s iden-tity – and this is leading to clashes of culture, to cultural wars . Rather than culture integrating people into a single community, once it became a tool of identity it began to lead to conflict. In-stead of culture being the expression of self-improvement, it has become an ideology. Religion is part of culture, and as not only an integral but indeed the most important part of culture it has been turned into a means . This is easiest to see in the fact that reli-gious symbols have ceased to be religious symbols but have been transformed into symbols of affiliation, of belonging to a specific identity . Once they have been transformed into mere means of defending national (or any other) identities, religious symbols be-come a tool for conflict.4

The debate on globalization shows that culture has become the inner motive force for the development of modern societies. It is no wonder, then, that cultural studies are now at the forefront, particularly in the USA. Globalization is the rule of the post-mod-ern cultural paradigm. Globalization presupposes global culture as a universal culture . In the age of biotechnology, the difference between nature and culture is disappearing; we are seeing the nat-uralization of culture and the culturalization of nature . At a time of increased migration, transnational culture demands translation and a cosmopolitan process of learning and understanding of the Other. The latest face of global culture, claims Paić, is revealing itself as the new ideology of a society of spectacles.5

Paić makes it clear that in his Clash of Civilizations and Who Are We? the American political scientist Samuel Hunting-ton transforms culture into ideology in the most explicit manner. As a result, any attempt to take issue against Huntington is inad-equate “unless it is directed at a radical political deconstruction of his cultural paradigm.” For Huntington, culture and identity are ideological concepts, serving in his new paradigm as sources of conflict with the Other: with the world around him, with Islamic fundamentalism, with multiculturalism, with Hispanic culture and with the Spanish language.6

4 See ibid ., 2055 ibid ., 1846 ibid ., 153-169

GLOBALIZATION AS THE NEGATION OF THE OTHER

10With the latest developments in biotechnology, global capi-

talism governs the world by linking three things: genetic tech-nology, the global economy, and the ethics of humanitarianism . Global capitalism thus has its own biopolitics, which reveals the world’s power holders as those who govern and hold sway over the life and death of individuals and entire populations, as Michel Foucault has observed. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben radicalized Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, which in this age of migration has become the blatant exclusion from the politi-cal community of refugees, asylum-seekers, stateless persons and migrants, reducing them to mere biological existences . Agamben refers to the loss of the distinction between life and death, now that the life of the individual has been turned into material to be used in various ways .7

In his Politika identita: kultura kao ideologija, Žarko Paić has shown that cultural identity in the age of globalization is a contested category, that culture has become an ideology used to justify global capitalism, an ideology of new identities, and that hegemony, and the exploitation and subjugation of the Other, lies concealed behind this ideology. For this reason, says Paić, we need to de-ideologize culture and deculturalize ideology .

Three hypotheses may be deduced from Paić’s book.If we are no longer bound by religion, which is part of cul-

ture, if religious principles are no longer to set standards for us, if religion has become a mere means to individual and collective identity, if religion does not demand an end to economic exploita-tion, political oppression, and injustice in all its forms, if it does not require of us that we strive to improve ourselves in the moral and spiritual sense, if culture as a whole is no more than a means, no more than a cosmetic feature of our identity, it is proof that we are becoming modern barbarians, and that humankind as a whole is entering an age of modern barbarism, for we are neither cultivated nor civilized, yet we possess modern weapons of de-struction, the most lethal weapons in the history of humankind. If culture has lost its power to make us better people, morally and spiritually, the way is wide open for modern barbarism to make its entrance .

In this age of globalization, culture has become the most dangerous of ideologies, used to justify global capitalism as an

7 ibid ., 170-203

Mile Babić

11everlasting, unchangeable system. Global capitalism has given rise to the greatest economic and political inequalities in the his-tory of humankind, and is now using every means it can to cov-er up these appalling inequalities, using culture as an ideology and claiming that the danger we face is not from economic and political inequality, but from cultural diversity as the principal source of conflict in the world of today. Those who are exploiting the majority of humankind economically, and subjugating them politically, use modern information technology and culture as a whole to claim that the threat to each of us and to humanity is not from this economic exploitation and political subjugation, but from cultural diversity . This is cynical in the extreme, for the danger cannot be from culture that has become ideology, a tool of identity and a means of dressing-up global capitalism – from culture that has lost its independent standing and authority – but from the proponents, both individual and collective, of the power of exploitation and oppression.

The ideology of cultural diversity has arisen from the post-modernism emphasis on these differences, which is so exaggerat-ed as to make intercultural dialogue, the integration of diversities and mutual cultural enrichment impossible, and conflict almost inevitable . Far from excluding commonality and intercultural communication, the irreducibility of cultural diversity necessar-ily entails them. If irreducibility is absolutized, it leads to conflict. And if what we hold in common is absolutized, this too leads to conflict. The end result is invariably violence. Extreme individu-alism leads to extreme bureaucracy and ultimate uniformity . This is the state of affairs in society today . On the one hand, we seem to have more and more room in which to enjoy individual liberties, but on the other, anonymous (bureaucratic) powers are increas-ingly defining that space. People are most easily governed these days by over-emphasizing and generating individual differences. In this way, ultimate individual freedom is transformed into the ultimate lack of freedom . In this new kind of individualism, we all think we are as free as can be, but in fact we could not be less free .

The proponents and generators of globalization claim that globalization is leading to the greater good of all, although they can themselves see that so far it has produced the very opposite. This type of conduct is known as cynicism, which Peter Sloterdijk

GLOBALIZATION AS THE NEGATION OF THE OTHER

12defines as “enlightened false consciousness.”8 This is a paradox – false and enlightened consciousnesses are incompatible. False-hood has become so powerful that it has arrogated and subordi-nated the Enlightenment, the enlightened mind, to itself; it has absorbed the Enlightenment . This gives rise to the need to review the Enlightenment. The proponents of globalization are the very ones who are constantly working against the positive aspects of globalization, as a result of which they contradict themselves, of which they are well aware. But they feel compelled to go along with the status quo . Cynicism is thus a modernised, enlightened, unhappy consciousness; it is false consciousness. The proponents of globalization thus feel obliged to act against their own con-victions; in other words, they feel compelled to live in a state of self-contradiction .

The question is why it should be so. Why do the proponents of globalization feel compelled to impose on the world as a whole their own economic model and their own image of the individual as an economic being, as something of universal validity, appro-priate to everyone in this world? Why is the activism of the propo-nents of globalization becoming ever greater and more frenetic? Can this western activism, which constitutes its own foundations, lead humanity to a calm haven, a haven where we can lead peace-ful, happy lives? Or will it destroy both itself and others?

The history of globalization

In volume II of his Sphären9 (Spheres), the German philoso-pher Peter Sloterdijk demonstrates that globalization began �,500 years ago among the Greeks, who envisaged the world as a sphere. This image of the world as a sphere has been particularly present in the political history of humankind. It is thus that Sloterdijk reveals the philosophical foundations of European political his-tory. With the discovery of America in 149�, the sphere became the globe . This second globalization, which began in 1492, has now been replaced by a third, in which the universal virtuality of all relations is leading not only to a crisis of the sphere, but also a crisis of space. Sloterdijk expounds the true history of globaliza-tion, from Plato’s and Aristotle’s geometrization of the heavens 8 Peter Sloterdijk, Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, Erster Band, Frankfurt am

Main: Suhrkamp, 1983, 37.9 ibid, Sphären II, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999.

Mile Babić

13to the present-day navigation of the globe, of planet Earth, not only by ships but also by capital and communications signals. “Globalization begins with the geometrization of the Unquantifi-able,”10 he avers, demonstrating how envisaging the sphere marks the beginning of instating and generating the sphere; how math-ematical and philosophical globalization anticipated terrestrial globalization by more than two thousand years. The Greek phi-losophers united ontology and geometry in the sphere. Sloterdijk notes that Heidegger is right when he characterizes the beginning of the modern age with an image; for it is an age in which the entire world is represented in images. In the modern age, Slot-erdijk continues, images and maps have consigned the globe to the background, opening up new opportunities to conquer the world: “Imperialism is applied planimetry, the art of transform-ing a sphere into plane surfaces. Only that which can be reduced to one dimension can be conquered.”11

In Sloterdijk’s view, European expansion began with cartog-raphy. Everything the Europeans conquered, they gave a Euro-pean name to. “Perhaps globalization, like history in general, is a crime that can be committed only once.”12 What began in the 16th century reached its peak of perfection in the �0th . Nowadays, “the globalized world is synchronized, and its standard of time is a manufactured present.”13

Sloterdijk refers to two oecumenes. In the first, that of the Greeks, people participated in the same mystery of the world, in the manifest and hidden grounds of reality . This single reality, shared by all, was the basis of their unity . The second oecumene shattered the universality of the first, destroying everything that we all held in common . Christianity, which cast itself as a universal religion, proved to be particularistic. There is sufficient evidence of this aspiration to universality in the Papal Bull Unam sanctam, issued by Boniface VIII, in which he asserts that everyone must submit to the Bishop of Rome if they are to achieve salvation.14

In the first oecumene, the exemplary man was the sage medi-tating on the Absolute, participating in the divine sphere, and the

10 ibid ., 4711 ibid ., 81112 ibid ., 94713 ibid ., 98114 ibid ., 790

GLOBALIZATION AS THE NEGATION OF THE OTHER

1�saint who dared to feel closer to God than the sinner, thanks to di-vine mercy. In the second oecumene, the exemplary person is the one who is high-ranking, who will never understand why he has enjoyed greater success than others, and the anonymous thinker who is open to the key experiences of every age. The sphere of the first oecumene became a plane surface in the second; and a plane cannot be a home for all, but only a marketplace for eve-ryone. Unlike the mediaeval period, modernity cannot integrate every subsphere into a single sphere.

In both volumes of his Sphären, Sloterdijk demonstrates that the history of philosophy and of the world repress and negate the other. In the first volume,15 he deals with the repression and nega-tion of the other on the individual level, in the microsphere; in the second, he addresses the repression and negation of the other on the collective and historical level, in the macrosphere. In the first volume, he demonstrates that, despite everything, the individual is other-directed, and that the other invariably forms part of one-self; in the second, he indicates, albeit indirectly, that the same is true of the political sphere.

The negation of the other without and the other within us

It is clear from Sloterdijk’s exposition that the history of glo-balization has been the negation of the other, the alien . The aim of globalization, then, was dis-alienation, liberation from the other . So the question, once again, is where does this powerful need to negate the other without and the other within us spring from? My understanding is this . An entity that has not been conquered is not a true entity as far as Europeans are concerned; it is a nullity, an entity of no intrinsic value. Given that to the Europeans any entity that they have yet to subjugate is mere apparence (Schein), a mere nothing (Nichts), Europeans’ entire efforts are focused on pro-ducing the true entity out of this nonentity, this worthless being . Every entity that the Europeans have not yet conquered is an in-sult to them, and a source of fear and threat . This is why they must conquer such entities, making them nonentities in order to turn them into full entities. Every entity they have yet to overpower is thus an empty entity, as far as the Europeans are concerned; and it can become complete only through their actions.

15 Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären I, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998.

Mile Babić

15This European negation of the other, of the alien in the mac-

rosphere corresponds to the European negation of the other, of the alien within the individual, in the microsphere. The alienness that none of us can escape is known as radical alienness.16 The only entity Europeans as individuals regard as valid is an entity they have produced, an entity that is the product of their decision, their freedom, their self-determination; and the corollary of this is that radical alienness, to Europeans, is any entity that does not derive from them . This radical reality is known as birth . If we determine ourselves in all things, from start to finish, the principal obstacle to this self-determination is our birth: for none of us has ever de-termined whether to be born or not, and when .

No one asked us if we wanted to be born . We were born, but not asked; someone decided the matter for us . The fact of birth thus manifests itself as the greatest enemy of our freedom, our self-determination . If we determine ourselves entirely, if we con-stitute ourselves completely, birth is indeed the principal obstacle to our self-actualization as human beings . This is not all . Birth is an affront to our freedom as self-determination and the denigra-tion of the freedom that we constitute for ourselves. Europeans are ashamed of their origins, their birth, the origo pudenda as Nietzsche put it in On the Genealogy of Morals, A Polemic (Zur Genealogie der Moral, Eine Streitschrift, 1887); and this means being ashamed of their ancestry .

We were given life without our permission, and that life was given a name; its human dignity was acknowledged, but without our permission. But for Europeans, who do not recognize a life or dignity that they themselves have not produced, our freedom seems to arise out of nothing, out of a worthless entity, an onto-logical nullity, an ontological vacuum .

Freedom that comes into being by negating an acquired en-tity realizes itself by negating everything that is not identical to itself . Outwardly, this negation manifests itself as Eurocentrism, logocentrism, imperialism, ethnocentrism; inwardly, it manifests

16 See Bernhard Waldenfels, Topographie des Fremdes, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997. For the European as a closed individual (homo clausus), see Norbert Elias, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, Basel: Verlag Haus zum Falken, 1939 . (Published in English as The Civilizing Process, Vol.I. The History of Manners, Oxford: Blackwell, 1969, and The Civilizing Proc-ess, Vol.II. State Formation and Civilization, Oxford: Blackwell, 1982) .

GLOBALIZATION AS THE NEGATION OF THE OTHER

16itself as egocentrism and narcissism. Since European freedom arises from a blank entity, from an ontological deficit, it is con-stantly striving to supplement this deficit, perpetually operating centripetally. Freedom of this kind is faced with a Sisyphean task: it longs to fill this ontological vacuum, even though it is impossi-ble for a being that has been born – which is limited, finite, mortal – to do so .

Concluding observations

The current debate on globalization and its history demon-strates that globalization has so far been the negation of the alien-ness outside us and the alienness within us. Europeans regard any entity that does not derive from them, that they have not them-selves produced, as a blank, worthless entity, one deserving only of destruction. Europeans direct their efforts at creating a full en-tity from an empty one: and they do this in both the macrosphere and the microsphere. Freedom that arises from the negation of acquired being realizes itself by negating everything that is not identical to itself . Outwardly, this negation manifests itself as Eu-rocentrism, logocentrism, imperialism, ethnocentrism; inwardly, it manifests itself as egocentrism and narcissism . Inwardly, Eu-ropeans as individuals deny everything they have not themselves produced – their own birth, death, love, past and future; outward-ly, they deny the regions of the world they have not subjugated . They are thus faced with a Sisyphean task: they long to fill this ontological vacuum, even though it is impossible for a being that has been born – which is contingent, finite, mortal – to do so.

Since birth occurred in the past, and the being that was born does not derive from the self, for modern Europeans the past does not exist as a temporal dimension, and neither does the memory of past events. What is more, for modern Europeans the future does not exist either, and nor does hope for a new life in the fu-ture. Everything that reminds Europeans as individuals of their radical alienness – birth at the start of life and death at the end – simply does not exist as far as they are concerned. They deny existence to both birth and death, acknowledging neither their be-ginnings, since they are not the authors of it, nor death, if they do not themselves bring it about. For Europeans, suicide is the acme of their freedom, their self-determination . The culmination of self-determination is to put an end to the life they acquired

Mile Babić

17through birth, and to do so in order not to yield any further . For Europeans, only the present exists; they aspire to constitute them-selves as an everlasting present, which is a pointless task, leading only to destruction and self-destruction. Whatever Europeans as individuals cannot understand, take, and arrogate to themselves simply does not exist.

Having become the negater of radical alienness, which in-cludes birth, death and love, past and future, Europeans as in-dividuals have long since become the negaters of absolute ali-enness, of the absolute Other. This European negation of the absolute Other implies the negation of alienness both outside and within us ourselves. Every European -ism to date, from Eurocen-trism and logocentrism to narcissism, is nothing more than a sur-rogate for the absolute Other, whom Europeans have forgotten and denied . Only alienness is absolute . They sought to absolutize themselves, or to reduce something of theirs to destruction and self-destruction . By denying the other and absolutizing oneself, one becomes a stranger to oneself and to others, feeling alien in one’s own home and in the world at large.

The greatest Franciscan thinker of all time, John Duns Sco-tus,17 claimed that the most imperfect form of freedom is the one that springs from an ontological deficit, an ontological vacuum, a void or nonentity; and the most perfect form of freedom is the one that springs from fullness or abundance of being. Freedom that springs from a void, from nonentity, from an ontological defi-cit, manifests itself as arrogation and self-aggrandizement, which leads to destruction and self-destruction; but freedom that springs from fullness of being, from complete profusion and wealth of being, manifests itself as self-bestowal, as an unlimited, unre-stricted gift; and as humility, the self-humility that seeks to save every being . Freedom of this kind leads to a full life .

17 Mile Babić, “Poimanje slobode kod Ivana Duns Škota” (“John Duns Sco-tus’ Concept of Freedom”), Jukić, �0 (�00�): 87-111. The author interprets fifteen Questions concerning freedom from Scotus’ Questiones super libros metaphysicorum Aristotelis, opera philosophica IV, general editor: Girard J . Etzkorn, libri VI-IX, New York: The Franciscan Institute of St . Bonaven-ture University, 1997 .

GLOBALIZATION AS THE NEGATION OF THE OTHER